The Mother Lode IPA

This Tuesday the BBC arranged to have a few of us BBC Sandwich beer club members go to the Mayflower brewery in Plymouth to cask two firkins of IPA one of which will be served at a near future beer club meeting.  Of course I jumped at the chance. 

First you enter the beautiful tasting room where one of the brewers greeted us and gave us some samples.  He tells us that the bar was built by local carpenters in exchange for .... you guessed it .... beer.  Really who doesn't work for beer?

Mash tun and wort kettle:

Fermentation in progress:

Some unfiltered Golden Ale straight from the fermentation tank:

The motley crew from BBC getting ready to fill the cask from left to right (Uncle Rico, Soto, yours truly, and some nice hippy lady whose name I've forgotten but I know she likes to make mead and wine at home).

We would dry hop the cask, add the clarifier and priming sugar, and then pour the beer into the cask from the fermentation tank before hammering in the bung.

And finally the end result.  They let us name the beer and Soto came up with the name "Mother Lode".  Works for me.

Really nice of the folks at Mayflower letting us visit to do this.  As I said before in a previous blog post, they brew really solid beer and now I know the people behind are really cool too.